Jing Xue’s Weblog
Upgraded from 7.10 to 8.04 last week. The Upgrade went quite smooth, especially considering I have been running a mixed kde 4/kde 3 setup, with the kde 4 pulled directly from the kde.org repo.
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About this time last year, I decided to switch to Linux. I lived happily ever after in (K)Ubuntu, with my original Windows still kept around (one word: games). So after upgrading my workhorse desktop at home a couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to reinstall both OS’s in a dual-boot setup. The experience from the two setup processes was unbelievably radically different. more…
When I was installing my Ubuntu, there was this part where an experienced admin would spend some time devising a plan for which part of file system should be mounted from which partition. I decided to skip it and kept everything except /home on one single partition - just to keep it simple. Well, at an unfortunate moment during the past weekend, it suddenly hit me that I should stop being such a noob, and “make things proper”. more…
I couldn’t wait until the Feisty release, and upgraded to the beta a couple of weeks before the release date. Everything else went through quite well, except for the new Network Manager. more…
You'd (I did) think now that we have all figured out how to build 1.4.2 in Edgy, building 1.4.3 should be just some rather boringly repeated procedure. Nope.
For the APR and APR-UTIL packages required by subversion, there are libapr0, libapr1.0, and libapr1 and their corresponding libaprutil* in Synaptic. Despite that the libapr0 description says that it is "currently used by Apache2, Subversion...", or that 1.4.2 was happily built with libapr1.0, you want to get libapr1/libapr1-dev/libaprutil1/libaprutil1-dev, and use this configure line: (I don't care much about accessing through webdav)
The standard Ubuntu repository has only 1.3.2. Higepon's tips worked very well. In addition to the packages listed, I had to also install 'expat-dev'.
Oddly, in this age of GUI, I'm seriously thinking about using mutt to handle emails. I tried both Evolution and Thunderbird. Neither turned out satisfactory at handling the multiple IMAP accounts I have. The Linux version of Thunderbird is particularly slow - compared to the Windows version. more...
So after getting myself comfortable enough in the new Ubuntu home, I thought it was time to expand it - quite literally - I wanted to carve a new partition out of what was now one big 66GB NTFS partition, and to move /home to there so that it would be kept separately from the rest of the system. more...
The Marvell Yukon Gigabit onboard NIC coming with my ASUS motherboard had some problem hooking up with the DLink router. You would think, when both devices are 100baseT by default, the auto link speed negotiation ought to have been a mere formality. But, everytime after the system just boot up, it would take anywhere between 5 seconds to 30 minues for the two to shake hands and achieve a viable link. The visible symptom is the DHCP requests kept getting ignored, and in turn no IP can be obtained from the router for the system.
In Windows, I had to go to the driver configuration, disable the "auto sensing", and explicitly set the NIC to 100baseT. In Ubuntu, this is done by adding the following script to /etc/network/if-pre-up.d:
Everytime when the network interfaces are initialized, this script (along with everything else in that if-pre-up.d directory) is executed before dhcpclient is involved.
Update:
Use sudo ifdown -a to bring down all interfaces, and sudo ifup -a to bring them back up.
I'll catch up later the couple of "episodes" which I'm skipping over and jumping to the Java set up part. Ubuntu comes with gcj and other GNU-based java facilities, which mostly are still only equivalent to JDK 1.4.x. So they needed to get chucked right away, and replaced with the Sun JDK 5. It's pretty straightforward to install JDK 5, Eclipse, and the rest of the arsenal I work with on the daily basis. The only part involving manual setting was when enabling the Java Plugin and Web Start in Firefox. Here's The Plugin Portion of it. more...
